“I often felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of decisions I had to make”
by Amy Haywood
Great teaching inside the classroom relies heavily on high-quality curriculum planning outside the classroom. But achieving this is challenging.
Take secondary English – the subject I used to teach. The NSW syllabus requires that a year 10 student should be able to analyse and evaluate text structures and language features of literary texts and make relevant thematic and intertextual connections with other texts, but it includes scant detail on what that analysis might involve.
This leaves vast gaps for the teacher to fill in. For a study of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, for instance, the teacher needs to make a huge number of decisions – how much time to spend on the historical context of 1930s southern America, which scenes to read closely and which to skip, what themes and literary features students should understand.
I often felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of curriculum decisions I had to make as well as the late-night searches for best materials. This was all before I even got to the part where I had to ensure students learnt how to write an analytical essay, let alone devise a strategy to help my struggling students, some of whom were still working on the basics of writing.
The near-infinite decision-making about the detailed content to teach is replicated across year levels and subjects. The inevitable result is a wide variation in teaching and learning between classrooms, resulting in a lesson lottery for students and teachers.
If teachers don’t know what preparation students have had in previous years, they may waste precious time planning for and reteaching concepts and skills students have already mastered, or they may overlook critical concepts and skills, assuming students have already been taught them.
For students, this means they can sit in classrooms packed with poorly connected activities that can be highly repetitive or leave critical learning gaps.
Even the hardest-working teachers will struggle to give their students the best education under these circumstances.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Some schools have adopted a different way. They have committed to a whole-school approach to curriculum planning that reduces teachers’ individual planning workloads, builds teachers’ expertise and ensures students have access to common, high-quality learning opportunities no matter what class they’re in.
At Grattan Institute, we’ve closely studied this approach in five schools across the country to understand how they make this work in practice. A visitor to one of these schools can quickly see the difference. They’d notice that each year 3 reading class was tackling the same content as the other year 3 reading classes down the hall, with small adjustments to the pace of lessons, opportunities for additional practice and the unique personality of each teacher. Likewise with year 6 maths, year 7 history and so on.
The benefits are huge, as the teachers made clear to us.
For example, at Marsden Road Public School, a government primary school in south-west Sydney, teachers have a shared “core program”, which includes a detailed learning sequence for each subject, common assessment schedules, lesson plans and classroom materials. This common approach means teachers are sharing the planning load and using collective expertise. As one teacher said, “I finally know what someone should have done last year. You don’t have the gaps.”
But this kind of alignment does not just happen – it takes a lot of hard work behind the scenes to get there and a strong culture of professional trust.
Unfortunately, Grattan Institute’s new survey of 2243 teachers and principals suggests these schools are the exception, not the rule. Half of teachers surveyed told us they were planning lessons on their own, and only 15 per cent said they had access to a common bank of high-quality curriculum materials.
To end the lesson lottery, governments need to offer a much more practical helping hand. All schools should have access to comprehensive, carefully sequenced curriculum materials that they can choose to adapt and use as required. These materials should be quality-assured by independent reviewers so teachers can be confident they are road-tested and ready for the classroom.
These materials should be comprehensive – providing teachers with everything they need to teach right down to lesson-level materials – so they can focus on adapting their approach to meet their students’ needs. Schools should have ready access to a broad suite of options to avoid the perception that governments are mandating one option over another.
Of course, this is not a silver bullet. Curriculum-specific professional learning for teachers and principals also needs a major boost. Teachers’ ever-expanding workload needs to be trimmed so they have time to focus on preparing for class.
But ensuring these materials are available – and teachers know how to find them and use them effectively – is critical to ending Australia’s lesson lottery. It would have made a real difference for me and my students.
Amy Haywood
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